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QNX give update of new Amiga OS and GUI
g.macdonald wrote in to
send us news of the new Amiga GUI based on QNX. It
looks very perty. How long before we have a GNOME and Enlightenment
theme that mimics it.
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I've always liked operating systems. I think the idea of booting up a new OS and having your computer look and act totally diffrent is soooo cool. That's why everytime I hear about a new or old x86 operating system I start banging my head againt my monitor in joyous glee. Well I don't really, but I imagine I am. Well actually that isn't really true either, if it's a microsoft operating system I imagine Bill Gates hanging over a giant pit of acid and me taking . . . never mind.
Anyways, I wanted to express a dream of mine. I dreamed that in the not so distant future companies would place their old operating systems like os/2 1.x or next/openstep on an ftp site or something and let people download them for free(as in beer). This is realted to the Amiga's OS I think because the Amiga OS is old(date wise, not neccesarily technology wise). That does make this post on topic, right? Does that last sentence admit guilt?
You're not paranoid if they're really out to get you.
Who is they?
You know... THEM...
-- Erich
Slashdot reader since 1997
I think you're ranting -- just a little.
:)
1 .patch.README
Are you talking QNX4 or Neutrino?
What is it you hate about it? QNX4 has got full POSIX APIs, plus quite a few BSD and SysV libs, ANSI C/C++. With Watcom 10.6 and the unix lib PD stuff from the 'net ports pretty easily. I ported Samba in a couple of hours and I think Apache just compiles and links these days. It's got full POSIX threads and a couple of Java VMs now. Kaffe has also been ported by different people.
Neutrino gets more QNX4 features everyday. Soon it will be QNX5 (Maybe Amiga OS5 _is_ QNX5?
And in terms of raw speed and determinism it's hard to beat. This lowly 400Mhz Pentium II does a full process-to-process context switch in less than 500nS (yes, nanoseconds).
Yes, development licenses aren't cheap but your runtime licensing is based on your volume. If you're selling thousands of units your price drops to $50 and less.
If you are looking to switch to Linux you might be interested in a QNX scheduler for Linux here: http://linuxhq.com/doc/QNX-scheduler-2.0.31-pre3-
and QNX kernel APIs implemented as a Linux kernel module here: http://tor-pw1.netcom.ca/~fcsoft/index.html
alternatively a shared-memory implementation of Send()/Receive()/Reply() can be found here:
http://www.holoweb.net/~simpl
Regards,
--aj
It's the "Boing" ball. One of the first ever Amiga demos had a 3D "Boing" ball bouncing around the screen, making a "boing" noise whenever it hit the border. In the post-Commodore era, the "Boing" ball got adopted as an unofficial Amiga logo. Somewhere along the line it became the official logo. Just as well; I think it's way cooler than the old rainbow tickmark logo that Commodore used.
http://www.amiga.com/diary/1999/990799-e.html
Read the Executive Update article as well. Interesting dynamics between this announcement and the QNX announcement of only a few hours earlier.
-DrPsycho - Coping with reality since 1975
Face it, there will be no generous support from companies with established products (and niche markets) to revive the Amiga scene, they're after your money while trying to minimize the necessary investments. The Amiga fans are known to be very faithful and commited to their platform and not at all reluctant to pay large amounts of money to keep their system up-to-date. It therefore makes much sense for companies like QNX (for whom the number of Amiga devotees is significant compared to their own user base, btw.) to attempt to lure the Amigans to their platform.
If you want an interesting alternative OS (which will hopefully continue to support non-x86 platforms), choose BeOS now, or wait for a more multimedia-desktop-friendly face of Linux.
I wish NeXT hadn't vanished so quickly...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I just have one question. Who are they expecting to buy this stuff? I can't think of any reason, except for maybe sheer curiousity, to buy this system.
The key to any OS is long-term credibility. People have to believe that your OS will be around in 5 years, or they won't develop for it, they won't invest in it, and they sure as hell won't buy it. There are a few different ways to get long-term credibility. QNX has none of them. You can be the 2000-pound gorilla of the OS world, so big that you are guaranteed to still be around in 5-10 years. This is how Microsoft does it. You can be Open-Sourced, thus guaranteeing that your "air supply" will never be cut off, and you cannot be killed. This is how Linux does it. You can attempt to squeeze in between these two by selling to a market that the others fail to address, a market which is guaranteed not to go away. This approach is somewhat shaky in terms of long-term credibility, which is why Be (selling to multimedia types and computer proffessionals) and Apple (selling to newbies and home users) are so shaky. QNX doesn't even have that. They seem to be pushing QNX as THE platform for QNX developers. Hmmm...
Other than that they seem to be offering features that are already done better by other OSs. POSIX support and X windows? Linux. Broad range of hardware support? Linux. Developer tools? Windows. The only original feature they seem to be offering is a superspiffy new hi-tech kernel, and a new GUI. My custom-compiled Linux kernel is running just fine, thank you very much. OS kernels are one area where newer is definitely not better. I want my kernel to be thoroughly tested, tried-and-true. As for the GUI, words fail me. In the extremely unlikely event that QNX has discovered some key aspect of GUI design that will revolutionize my productivity, I'll just download the Gnome/Enlightenment theme for it in a couple of weeks.
Taking all this into consideration, and reading between the lines on their web page, I think I've figured this out. Lacking any concrete market, they've somehow gotten ahold of the Amiga label, and intent to slap it onto a product that has nothing to do with Amiga (Whose real merit was its hardware, anyway) and hope that they can sell it to nostalgic Amiga-lovers. You Amiga folks out there, stay away. You're about to be saddled with an incompatible, dead-end OS with technical merit but no real-world value. Again.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" -Salvor Hardin
These days people seem far too concerned about the way things look and not enough about how they work.
It used to be that people would just try to copy features of the Mac UI without fully understanding the thinking behind them, now it seems that even Apple isn't even doing that well.
It's nice to see a -consistent- looking GUI for a change. The icons, the buttons, the sliders, they all appear to be created by a single artist, or at least by a well managed team. I havn't seen that kind of consistency since Kieth Ohlfs left NeXT. (He's now at PixelSight if you care...)
"Tomorrow's forecast: a few sprinkles of genius with a chance of doom!" - Stewie Griffin
Baby? Is that you, my little Amiga? Oh my GOD how you've grown!!! Come here... what new things do you have in store for me. What new wonders and excitement do you have, my Angel of an OS. It was you who got me into this whole computer world long ago... and you can bet you'll be mine again... finally... at long last. My Amiga is comming back....
The Amiga was born in a time when the OS didn't matter as much - and indeed most game programmers found it an unnecessary slowdown and just bypassed it. :-) But it's got an essence most of today's OSes lack in some measure or another - consistent user interface, speed, responsiveness, shell and GUI living side by side in harmony, etc. I mean, many of the problems KDE and Gnome are trying to solve in X, the Amiga solved a decade ago.
:-)
That said, everyone defines Amiga-like differently - and I don't define Amigalike the same way as some of the obnoxious "amiga r00lz d00d" purists who think UAE is blasphemous. I think the Amiga - or whatever it ends up reborn as - can exist independent of its hardware (so long as it doesn't end life on the shelf as "yet another failed x86 OS" alongside OS/2 and NeXTSTEP/x86).
But I have also been hearing some sweet things about the new hardware we're getting next year...
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
Let's get some things straight...
1. The whole new OS is being built on QNX, not just the GUI.
2. The GUI shown is Photon, QNX's GUI. The Amiga GUI will most likely be different.
Do some homework first.
They are the leading realtime OS for the x86 platform.
:-)
The Amiga project is based on their new Neutrino kernel which runs on x86, PPC, MIPS(and whatever the Amiga is going to run on
From their corporate backgrounder at: http://www.qnx.com/company/compover.html
"We lead the realtime industry not only in innovation but in experience as well. No other realtime OS vendor has over 18 years on the x86 platform. As a result, no other realtime OS offers more options for this environment. (We are now porting our advanced OS technology to several other platforms.)
QNX also leads the industry in marketshare. According to a recent Emerging Technologies report, "QNX Software Systems has the largest realtime OS market share in the Intel x86 marketplace". IDC Consulting and First Technology discovered similar findings. According to their recent Industry Report, QSSL has almost 22% of the marketshare for self-hosted development environments while the next largest share held by a realtime OS competitor is just over 11%."
> They would have been smarter to put that much
> effort into a vesion of KDE or GNOME for QNX.
> Either of them could be made to look a helluva
> lot like that desktop. And since QNX is still
> proprietary, it wouldn't really hurt them to
> have a GPLed desktop on top of it.
Could it be that they want a Desktop that works?
While their version numbers might have climed past 1.0 neither Gnome nor KDE are ready for comercial release. To say that they are rough around the edges is putting it mildly.
If they are serious about competing in the OS market. They need to have a GUI that is slick. (KDE does not look slick. Gnome looks slick but can't be considered slick because of its performance and unreliability.) The success of their OS is going to be based on first impressions. A User that walks away with a bad taste in his mouth because the GUI locked up are not goig to give them a second look. Certainly not with all of the alternative OSs that are now available (os/2, BeOS, Free BSD, NT, etc...).
So what exactly are we getting?
/is/ different, and /is/ built on top of the QNX OS, what the heck are they going to rip out to justify charging consumer OS prices for Amiga and industry OS prices for their existing clients?
That whole thing sounded like a sales pitch for QNX and their windowing stitch-on, Photon.
Gods, I have such a love-hate relationship with QNX. I think it'll make an amazing foundation to a new OS, but on the other hand I've developed under QNX for the last year and I hate it - it's a RTOS and gods help you if you aren't writing a specialised realtime app for thousands of installations. And I don't see much in that press release telling you what you get that you can't already have:
- QNX OS foundation - The QNX OS is already available for the x86. (A license'll cost you, at last check, $1K+ cdn unless you can get major volume discounts. A new pricing structure, actually, and the straw that broke our little software house's back and is pushing us to a free, full-featured OS that starts with an 'L')
- Photon Micro-GUI - I've never used their Photon. We have no licenses for it. QNX likes licenses. (Did you know that QNX requires a separate license for their TCP/IP package?) Oh, but Photon does already exist anyway.
- x86 architecture. So we're using the same machine guts too.
What Amiga? where? Is this going to be QNX on x86 with a slightly enhanced GUI with its own look-and-feel - and the Amiga label.
Another thought. QNX charges big bucks for their OS. More big bucks for development licenses. A new Amiga is going to be a consumer machine, right? So if this wonderful new OS
Of course, I may just be ranting, after spending another month working on a minor release number on QNX rather than the next major release on Linux. So take what I say with a grain of salt.
--Tiger
Might I refer you to freshmeat.net?
I think (last time I read) that www.qnx.com runs on QNX. I guess it's not that great under heavy load since it's slashdotted already. Anyone got the images in their cache so I don't have to wait until tomorrow to view them?
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perl -e 'print scalar reverse q(\)-:
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